2025 | Platypus

Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, Felipe Figueiredo  April 15, 2025

Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed, and the latest trend is to focus on the need to develop infrastructure to power data centers, in the US at least, where one of us is writing from. A data center is a facility where data is processed or stored, or where computer power is redistributed, where “the cloud touches the ground” (Johnson 2023: 6-7). By focusing on the history of the data centers we research, our goal in this piece is to demonstrate how they are built on top of existing infrastructures, and do not exist in thin air. (read more...)

From Bin to Bank: Recycling Household Waste in Urban Indonesia

 Jiwon Kim  April 10, 2025

Konten ini juga tersedia dalam Bahasa Indonesia

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Every Thursday at 9 o’ clock in the morning, housewives from a residential neighborhood on the outskirt of Jakarta gather at their usual spot at the “Love Earth” waste bank (bank sampah). It is a small lot in the corner with a humble setup with a hut, a shed, and sacks of recyclables. Whoever arrives first begins sweeping the area and wiping the table, often damp from the last night’s rain and scattered with fallen leaves. One after the other, more women trickle in, each carrying a bag of recyclable waste from their households on foot, on motorcycles, or, more rarely, in cars. At times, items left by their neighbors—bundles of empty water gallons, piles of flattened cardboard boxes, or bottles of used cooking oil—wait to be weighed and sorted. The volume and the types of recyclables gathered each week may vary; yet food, tea, and chatter are invariably shared among those present. (read more...)

Who Will Protect Andean Potatoes in the Near Future? Uncertainties About the Next Generation of Native Potato Conservationists

 Sebastian Zarate  April 8, 2025

Este contenido también está disponible en Español

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This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. Rene Gomez was one of the most renowned potato curators at the International Potato Center (CIP, Centro Internacional de la Papa in Spanish). Potato curators provide reliable advice in safeguarding the CIP collection, carrying out key activities such as the acquisition, registration, cleaning, storage, regeneration, and distribution of seeds and other planting materials. Gomez’s 35-year journey with CIP left a remarkable legacy among potato conservation experts. I met him in February 2023 during my dissertation field work in Peru. I spent many hours listening to his life story, during which I learned how his work was connected to CIP’s history and research, about his dedication to his work, and about his concern for the future of potato curation. “We are an endangered species, us taxonomists and curators,” he mentioned. Gomez was worried about the precarity of the field, particularly the lack of young people who would continue his work after his retirement. (read more...)

Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself

 Allie E.S. Wist  April 3, 2025

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The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins. In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. (read more...)

Witnessing the Porous World

 Misria Shaik Ali  April 1, 2025

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Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. (read more...)

Following Primates

 Virendra Mathur, Aarjav Chauhan  March 25, 2025

यह सामग्री हिंदी में भी उपलब्ध है

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Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold (read more...)

Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona

 Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín  March 13, 2025

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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This Women’s History Month, we are publishing an interview with Colombian anthropologist Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Her ethnographic work is influenced by Latin American feminist epistemologies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), so we thought it would be valuable to share her perspective on multimodal ethnographic research. Nicolás Gaitán-Albarracín and I conducted this interview via videoconference. In this conversation, Osejo-Varona tells us how she collaborates with different scientific communities to explore new ways of listening to the beings that live underwater. Technologies such as microphones, hydrophones, algorithms, model maps, and spectrograms allow us to imagine other ways of relating with the species living in rivers, especially those cataloged as “invasive” in socio-ecosystems of Colombia. These new methodological approaches open forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work to construct new sensitivities and empathies capable of envisioning other human and non-human worlds. (read more...)